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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 




From an ambrotype taken at 

Princeton, Illinois, July 4th 1856 

BY AYiLLiAM Masters 



ABRAHAM 
LINCOLN 



THREE ADDRESSES BY 

MELANCTHON WOOLSEY STRYKER 

•'I 

PRESIDENT OF HAMILTON COLLEGE 



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^UCaSl^CaU^E^, no lotolv born» 00 ruDrl^ brrt, 
SDrcrreD t^ir Captain of t^ost lunD ^rarg, 
Jloneltng of tE^ime , toit^ «uflfocating trarsi 
ilaio trnfirrl^ among t^r migljtifgt DraD, 
^^at trusttt tD^at lobft t\)^ totoering dpiric Iro 
tEtjro Darb, tremntUou^ Da^tf! ^Ijat ganitt? 
^irtru t^? gaDnrfifsi, ill j]5C<«^Jlj^ ! J^umanit^ 
^|>? mp0tic bin, toljosff life toitl^ longing bUD, 
^ttC of tt)f ig^tsic, to tDdo t^r ^outb anD i^ortb 
In ttie tnar blasftt 0implr, sfo nnatnare 
<«^f tbp rare Dignity, pitiful mh toi^e, 
l^earing tbe unDertones; t^at siummonrD fort^ 
0rrat ))Ofit& to Die, tDbtn all toasi Donr , to bear 
tE^b^ i^fti libation to tbe sacrifice! 



Hbtabam ^Lincoln 

FIRST SAID TO THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF 
BROOKLYN, FEBRUARY 12, 1895. 











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OUBT not, all you true gentlemen, that it 
is time for an American Book of Days. 
This land we love is old enough and rich 
enough in men and achievements to have 
a rubricated record all its own. 
The dates which punctuate its great 
events, its births and burials, its successive and inter- 
woven crises of national evolution, its high tides and 
low, its "storms and tempests greater than almanacs 
can report," its feasts and fasts, its anguish and its 
anthems— these dates make a calendar with all its weeks 
illuminated and emphatic. More than we often pause to 
remember are we rich in history, not merely of a conti- 
nental, but of a world-wide significance. Our life is of 
inter-centurial and planetary import. Each month is a 
volume, with its peculiar, illustrious and garlanded 
events. Wonder at all that our American Aprils have 
witnessed, recall the annals of our great Julys, and then, 
you who love your country and treasure in your hearts 
her excellences of character and action, with also her sins, 
her repentances, her renewed probations, turn your 
thoughts to February, least in length of the twelve, but 
with two natal days, starset and resplendent, and own 
that the month with such a 22d and such a 12th, is the 
chief and brightest in all the round of the zodiac ! 

We are met, under the compulsions of a common rev- 
erence, to keep high festival, upon one of Columbia's 
cradle-nights, nay, to recall the gift, thro us, of one of 
the royal heirs of a world's admiration and wistful affec- 



2 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

tion. Ours indeed he is : but not ours only. The pantheon 
of Time claims him as one of Humanity's types and 
leaders. The ''razure of oblivion" shall never touch his 
story, nor devotion to its high import become obsolete. 

Amid the awed and woful group that watched that 
wild April night sink to the ashen dawn, Stanton was 
one, and when all was ended, it was his voice that spake 
out in solemn and befitting prophecy, "Now he belongs 
to the ages." The ages claim Lincoln. Thenceforward no 
one city, commonwealth or clime could appropriate him. 
History admits no transient and local monopoly to in- 
trude between her and her elect dead. Thev are her own. 
She is their Rizpah and their Rachel. 

"Never before that startled morning" — wrote Lowell, 
(at the conclusion of that essay whose strong and chiseled 
paragraphs go with the masculine emotion of the Com- 
memoration Ode to make up his complete and unsur- 
passed tribute) — "Never before that startled morning 
did such multitudes of men shed tears for one thev had 
never seen. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as 
the silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged 
when they met on that day. Their common manhood 
had lost a kinsman." 

That day is one of the strange indelible memories of 
my bo3^hood. How long and how little seems this inter- 
val of thirty years! But as each year has gone, with 
what certainty of just conviction, it has added one more 
tier to the masonry whereon is founded that ascendant 
and invulnerable fame. How such a story effaces the 
poor pride of language! How unequal are iridescent 
word-bubbles to catch and carry the tremulous half- 
lights and the true splendors of that luminiferous char- 
acter ! How must the soul stammer and sob that yields 
to the whole appeal of a spirit so great, so genuine, so 
gentle. Little indeed w\\\ the world heed, nor long re- 



AN IMMORTAL MEMORY 3 

member, what any lips can now say o! him, — enough 
that it will never forget what he did for us and for all 
men. 

Who, then, shall presume to think that he has w^ell 
summarized or at all completely analyzed the contents 
of such a life? I lay my withering blossoms with those 
of his innumerable lovers, knowing that were their stems 
of gold and their petals of ruby, these would rust and 
dim long before the tooth of time had touched his im- 
mortal renown. I deprecate your heed to me, even while 
I entreat it. Think round, past, over, beyond, my frail 
and slender utterances. Let your reasoned gratitude 
and heartfelt admiration weave their own tributes in 
W' ords that no man can utter. Let the " mystic chords " 
that he knew so well to touch into music, sound their 
master's requiem. Sursum Corda! He was God's gra- 
cious gift to a tormented and distracted time. He took 
Who gave. He W^ho gave and took, guards the inacces- 
sible honor of a supreme and solitary soul, who, ''having 
served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep." 

Bare-browed and wet-eyed, w'e stand in this our day 
under a firmament whose four-and-forty stars, unnamed 
and indistinguishable by any claim of severalty, make 
one unrivalled and unquenchable constellation, and 
highly resolve that Abraham Lincoln shall not have 
lived in vain nor vainly died ! 

And we declare our faith that the theme of that lost 
leader's greatness \n\\\ still be new, curious, alluring, in- 
spiring, until America shall have failed of her memory, 
until patriotism is senile, until self-sacrifice is no longer 
cogent, until popular government is moribund and de- 
mocracy is numbered with the lost arts. 

In the city of Chicago, at the entrance of the beautiful 
park that bears his name, there is placed commandingly 
a statue of our greatest President. 



4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Doubtless nearly all of you are familiar with its noble 
and unassuming pose. But what has always most im- 
pressed my imagination is that which stands just behind 
the exalted figure of the man — that empty chair ! Never 
was vacant throne so suggestive and so full. Well might 
those words have been sculptured there which Lincoln 
uttered so early as 1858 — "Tho I now sink out of view, 
I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the 
cause of liberty long after I am gone." All of the memo- 
rials of such a nature and the reminiscences of such a 
life are significant and inestimably precious. Vie are to 
be glad that the narrative by his partner, Herndon, both 
establishes so much intimate fact and dispels so much 
possible myth. It was an unusual witticism of Longfel- 
low's that auto-biography is what biography ought to 
be! In counterpart language, this close friend more 
than any other, or than all others, sets forth the real 
personality without gloss or apology. We want the neg- 
ative to be untouched in a single line, that we may get 
the truest impression of one who sat, quite behind what 
any strange or casual eye could see, within a most sensi- 
tive reticence. Frank as Lincoln was, unaustere, acces- 
sible — there was an inwardness and reserve behind whose 
further curtains few penetrated and the^^ but seldom. It 
is in his public words that we receive the deepest revela- 
tions of the strong and longing soul, so tender and so 
taciturn. His phenomenal gift of narrative was the 
alleviation not the assertion of his inmost self. Talk 
was his refuge from a ju'oud and stately sorrow, — a 
most pathetic and melancholy reverie. He was born 
under the sign of Aquarius. His life was clouded and 
rainy. Some of the sweetest sources of happiness were 
frozen to him. His yearning spirit turned upon itself and 
for the most part sealed its records. Upon that Crom- 
wellian face (for tho it was more than Cromwell's, it was 



HIS INDIVIDUALITY 5 

Cromwellian, wart and all) there were the seams of early 
responsibility and long restraint, and in all the humor of 
his smile there lurked the twitch of pain. 

We all know the story of his early days — Kentucky, 
Indiana, Illinois — the bare poverty, the indomitable 
struggle to learn, the country law office with its rough 
clinic of human beings — its pathology of affairs, his small 
book lore and yet his keen literary susceptibility, that 
apparent listlessness in which he thought, and thought, 
and grew. All around, as we see it, what a wretched 
school, and yet what a schooling God gave him there ! 
Soft raiment never sat well upon that home-spun king. 
Here, providentially, and out of the unlikeliest origins, 
was six feet and four inches of man. Little thripenny 
minds once sneered at his suburbanity and thought him 
outlandish, but splitting fencing or riving sophistry, 
steering a flatboat or a government, at the cabin hearth 
or at the capital of the Republic, in county law or com- 
mander of armies and fleets — that man, uncouth of limb 
and courtly of heart, is always and only Abraham Lin- 
coln! There was but one. There will be no other. 
The mould is broken. ''The case of that huge spirit is 
now cold.'' 

Where did he get that aquiline wit, that shrewd and 
sensitive judgment, that pronged logic, that felicity of 
instance, that sure touch of nature, that vital and saline 
style? For he was cunning in the niceties of language 
and coined wisdom into colloquial aphorism. What 
tough sense, what absence of vaporing, what conclusive 
directness, what sagacious transparency ! "Honest Old 
Abe" — what a thirty-third degree of popular confidence 
was that ! Which of us does not remember his wish that 
other generals "would get some whisky of the same 
kind" — his ballot-winning remark about "swapping 
horses while crossing a stream " — his appealing fun over 



6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

"Uncle Sam's web feet." Thackeray, once for all, defined 
a snob as "one who admires mean things meanly." A 
great man is one who seeks great things in a great way. 
So was Lincoln great. He "never sold the truth to serve 
the hour." 

With marvelous development he rose to each new 
demand and met it adequately, and there never was a 
day when he was not more of a man than the day before. 
Vast tact and absolute rectitude went together. He was 
a student of occasion, but never in the shifty and selfish 
sense an opportunist. He discerned concrete issues and 
was no doctrinaire. He cared for results and was no 
respecter of persons. He used what he could get and so 
got what he could use, knowing how to pursue that high 
expediency whose duty it is both to forego and to trans- 
cend mere legalities. Astute in deliberation and biding 
his time, he never surrendered to others one ounce of his 
own responsibility and he proved his wisdom in taking 
all the advice he could get and using what he thought 
best. 

"Gentle, plain, just and resolute," he surprised those 
who had thought to control him, by his revelations of 
aptitude and of decision. Lowell wrote: "While dealing 
with unheard of complications at home, he must soothe 
a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to 
become war." What tasks were these and with what 
untried tools ! His temper equalled the emergency. He 
wielded war measures without flinching, yet always as 
an elect citizen, and so loved both the Union and the 
Constitution, that in their preservation he saved the one 
from those who would have destroyed it, and the other 
from those who would have defended it to death by quib- 
bles. He saw that the Union was the very life of the Con- 
stitution—that academic distinctions are trivial in a 
struggle for existence — he could not consent to the cult 



HIS A UG LIST PA TIENCE 7 

of a disembodied spirit, nor protect the constitution of a 
corpse ! His elastic tact was also stubborn. He refused 
to embroil us with angry England in the Trent affair, 
jet made her better sense halt when thro the lips of Min- 
ister Adams he said: ''It is unnecessary for me to re- 
mind your lordship that this means war!" Even to 
John Bull what "Hosea Bigelow" called ''the fencin' 
stuff,- ' seemed likely to come a little too high ! 

Lincoln's self-restraint was not that of "a being with- 
out parts and passions,- 'but of one controlling his forces 
for use. Of slavery he said in '55: "I bite my lips and 
keep quiet": but, a while later, stirred to the depths by 
the seizure of a free black boy at New Orleans, he said — 
and I take his indignation not as an oath but as a vow 
—''By God, gentlemen, I'll make the ground of this 
country too hot for the feet of slaves ! " It was in that 
resolve that he entered upon the great debate in Illinois. 
He loved peace: but as a "just and lasting peace." "I 
hope it will come soon, and come to stay, and so come as 
to be worth the keeping for all future time." But his integ- 
rity never blenched. His utterances always ' meant busi- 
ness.' In the teeth of the counsels of timid friends he 
crystalized the truth in 1858. "This Union cannot 
endure, half slave and half free. A house divided against 
itself cannot stand.'' Withal, his rugged patience w^as 
as cautious, strategic, diplomatic, as it w^as persistent 
and courageous. Patience in him became a genius, a 
purpose that censors could neither hurry nor hinder. 

" He knew to bide his time : 

And can his fame abide 
Still patient, in his simple faith sublime, 

Till the wise years decide. 
Great captains with their guns and drums. 

Disturb our judgments for the hour: 
But at last silence comes. 

These all are gone, and, standing like a tower. 



8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Our children shall behold his fame ; 

The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man, 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame. 

New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

This manj-sided, yet directly simple President, this 
greatest Democrat of history, ennobled the people by 
trusting them and trusting himself to them, as they en- 
nobled themselves by responding to that trust. ''When 
he speaks,'* (wrote Lowell in 1864, in that monumental 
essay which I have before quoted) ''it seems as if the 
people were listening to their own thinking aloud.'' His 
alert ear heard alwa^^s that little click which precedes the 
striking of the clock. ''It is most proper (he said at 
Buffalo) that I should wait and see the developments 
and get all the light possible, so that when I do speak 
authoritatively I may be as near right as possible.'' 
''Why should there not be (so went his first inaugural) 
a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the peo- 
ple?" At "this great tribunal'' he pleaded. "This is 
essentially a peoples' contest," ran his first message. 

He knew how to interpret public opinion, and it an- 
swered him with a mighty and unbetrayed confidence. 
He both roused it to self-recognition and registered its 
vast resolve. He knew how to speak for the Nation, 
without obtruding himself. He knew how to speak to 
the nation as the voice of its own conscience. He had no 
conceit of vocabulary. The, to me, most moving lyric 
of those days utters that response of the nation, as the 
deed vindicated the song : 

"Six hundred thousand loval men 

And true have gone before, 
And we're coming, Father Abraham, 
Three hundred thousand more! '* 

Verily he had prophesied well, in his good-bye to the 
citizens of Indianapolis: "Of the people when they rise 
in mass in behalf of the union and liberties of their conn- 



HIS SUPREME FAITH 9 

try, truly it may be said, ' The gates of Hell shall not 
prevail against them.' " 

This soul to whose noble abstraction and dedicated 
purpose the small gossip of the world was naught, drank 
deep the cup of vicarious pain. He paid daily the pen- 
alty of heroic love. In his sympathy he became a sacri- 
fice. He ''bore his cross " for the soldiers in the field and 
the mothers in their homes. And all the while he was 
"sustained and cheered by an unfaltering trust," a 
"faith that right makes might," "that in some way 
men can not see all will be well in the end." He deserves 
a place with "the elders who obtained a good report 
thro faith," and yet who only foresaw Canaan and the 
Christ to be. He came, like Moses, no further than 
Pisgah. But he believed. He believed in himself, in 
America, in man, in God, and in that faith he climbed the 
steps of the altar. 

He was at once a poet and a prophet ; he had that in- 
tuition w^hich is the common differential of both — that 
insight which is foresight. For hear him, when leaving 
Springfield for "a duty greater than has devolved upon 
any man since Washington" — "Unless the great God 
who assisted him shall be with me and aid me, I must 
fail : but if the same omniscient and almighty Arm that 
directed and protected him shall guide and support me, 
I shall not fail — I shall succeed." By that token so was 
it unto him. I read and reread that pathetic invocation, 
I trace his growing trust in supreme mercy, I witness him 
"lead the whole nation thro paths of repentance and 
submission to the Divine will," I hear him urge "humble 
penitence for national perverseness and disobedience," 
and as our representative and spokesman say, "If every 
drop of blood drawn by the lash thro years of unrequited 
toil shall be repaid by one drawn by the bullet, still must 
we say our God is righteous." I see him not shrinking 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

nor counting the chances of his own life. And blessing 
God for such a heart-born testimony as that one more, — 
"Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who 
knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted 
a flower where I thought a flower would grow," — I chal- 
lenge those who question his intrinsic truth toward the 
Highest. 

Whatever were his speculative doubts, born of wholly 
inadequate religious teaching and hetchelled by exper- 
iences that embitter many — justice, mercy, humility, 
reverence, love, steadfast submission to God's will and 
way, these are the elements of the piety that Heaven 
accepts. He learned to pray and to intercede, and thro 
a temperate life he pitied the widow and the fatherless 
and kept himself unspotted from the world. '' Pure relig- 
ion and undefiled before God and the Father is this." 
Who loves what Christ loves, loves Christ. This high 
faith availed him in all affairs. He was no vagarist. Yet 
seeing and seizing the possible, he strove toward the 
stars. He was the most practical of idealists, believing 
that what should be can be, and that what should be and 
can be shall be ! 

Per aspera ad astra — thro stripes to stars, for that 
stands our dear flag. It is the seal of the national wed- 
lock between each state and the Union, and that which 
God hath joined together no man shall put asunder ! 

"Hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath," 
says Herndon, were Lincoln's words as in '56 he joined 
the party pledged to resist the extension of slavery. 

Lincoln felt the unconscious destiny of America and 
helped, in the forefront, to abate the taunt of the world 
that our eagle was but a vulture. In that stumbling 
and disastrous night his soul was one that believed in 
the morning. Only a base and bastard mind can forget 
that he was a part of the great price wherewith we ob- 



HIS INDIVIDUALITY H 

tained this freedom. The lost cause of caste was a tri- 
umphant failure. It freed the white man most. 
" So find we profit by losing of our prayers." 
"The struggle of today (said Lincoln's message of 
December, 1861) is for a vast future also." Thankfully 
I quote from that true poet,— Maurice Thompson : 

" I love the South. I fought for her 

From Lookout Mountain to the sea : 
But from my lips thanksgivings broke, 

When that black idol, breeding drouth 
And dearth of human sympathy 

Thro all our sweet and sensuous South, 
Was, with its chains and human yoke. 

Blown hell-ward from the cannon's mouth, 
Wliile Freedom cheered behind the smoke." 

Gentlemen, recall, you who can, that Good Friday, all 
those April days of 1865, when God "shewed us hard 
things and made us to drink of the wine of astonish- 
ment," — when victory was turned to mourning! 

Horror, incredulity, anguish — one wild, convulsed 
sob, "It can not, must not, shall not be!" And then 
the reeling certainty that it was, and an orphaned nation 
calling, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and 
the horsemen thereof!" All the lowly of the Earth 
mourned and in that mourning took hope for the uni- 
versal cause of the people and so the great conclave of 
human hearts canonized him by acclaim. Party passions 
withered in that august homage. Critics and detractors 
stood abashed or repentant. In the knowledge of what 
it had lost the land first realized what it had had. 

So that catafalque moved thro its slow procession of 
sixteen hundred miles. Dirges, minute guns, flambeaux, 
choirs, bells, and ever3^where black misery and piteous 
tears— at last, Springfield. The faithful tomb unveiled 
its bosom to take to its trust this new treasure and the 
troubled soul was at peace. But already that soul had 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

begun to keep its endless Easter. The hand that penned 
the proclamation has touched the hand of that lost child 
whom the father's heart had never ceased to mourn. 
Those steps have come out of tribulation to find that 
One who " saved others and himself could not save." An 
offering? Yes — his own tired and thankful soul ! A gift? 
Yes — not a sceptre, but a pen; not a crown, but a broken 
manacle. ' ' Well done, good ace? " — the gates are closed ! 

Once more I cite him. "We cannot escape history. 
The fiery trial thro which we pass will light us down in 
honor or dishonor to the latest generation." To honor, 
noble one ! In contrast, how poor are the powers and 
ambition of mere conquerors ! Where is the Bonaparte 
by the side of that tall spirit. Lincoln has one solitary 
peer in history —Wilham of Orange, like himself , a martyr 
to his patriotism. The first administration of Washing- 
ton gives parallel in the state of the army, the treasury 
and public opinion : but these were not war. The sorrow 
for Hamilton is an analog. I think of these three as the 
first three Americans. 

If Lincoln had not the charm of Hamilton and the 
urbane dignity of Washington, he had a sagacity rival- 
ing the one, a patience rivaling the other, and a tenacity 
that surpassed them both. But I would not compare 
them ; I would blend them all. They have passed under 
Time's impartial and dispassionate recognition. The 
place of Lincoln is secure in the judgment of mankind. 
Words can add nothing now to that monolithic fame. 
Death hath no more dominion over him. He was the 
top man of the century that is hurrjdng to its end. Let 
the ascription of the French people, so significant in its 
allusion to the lower empire, stand as our ultimate trib- 
ute — "He saved the Republic without veiling the statue 
of Liberty." 



II 



Hbrabam ILincoln 

SAID TO THE REPUBLICAN CLUB OF 
NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 12, 1897. 




UR President of the night, and my fellow- 
Republicans, (without distinction as to 
present condition of servitude) ; tho it is 
somewhat out of my line, you will permit 
me to remark that clubs are trumps. I 
suppose I should add that of them all this 
club is the ace. Certainly in the last twelvemonth a 
remarkable hand has been played for all it was worth. 
The superiority of the American lead to "bumble 
puppy" has been demonstrated, and the absurd finesse 
from a two-spot to a jack — from the platform to the 
candidate — having failed, the best hand won by tre- 
mendous odds, with what Charles Lamb delighted in, — 
"A clean hearth, a good fireand the rigors of the game." 
Brighter days are at the door. Empiricism is passing. 
A trusty leader, with his party about him, will carry us 
over the glad threshold of the new Century. 

But to my errand,— the holiday and the man. Thanks, 
under God, to him whose singular greatness is the token 
of all these your greetings, we have a Republic undivided 
and indivisible ! Your name and history is national ; so 
be your sympathies and your endeavors. He whom we 
are met to celebrate was a Republican, and was not 
ashamed to say so. Confusion is revealed in the sterility 
of the hybrid. Be it ours to wear the name of Republican 
as he defined and ennobled it, who held party as an in- 
strument, politics as his opportunity, patriotism his 
motive, and the people's ultimate truth his goal. 

Upon this radiant and solemn anniversary you are 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

assembled to relight the torch of the ' Wide-awake ' and 
the flambeau of mourning, gazing thro all upon yonder 
untorn emblem, — the guerdon of our a^vful travail when 
freedom was reborn and the guidon of our forward 
marching. Beautiful flag ! He loved it and maintained 
it. It is dearer for his true sake ! In the crises and ex- 
actions of the unrevealed years may the great price of 
which he was part never be forgotten; may its folds 
never be dimmed by dishonor, nor its glory abated by 
the recreancy of those nursed under its shelter ! Having 
beamed over broken manacles, may it never blush over 
broken promises or timid counsels ! From fort and fleet, 
from school and Capitol and home, let it float unsullied 
— the morning-bloom of freedom and equal justice to all 
who hope because they remember. And if by foes with- 
out, or direr foes within, its true meaning shall ever be 
menaced, may it be protected and lifted higher yet by 
hands that shall take heart of grace in recalling that 
knight of the axe and master of the pen who made ours, 
whatever else it shall be, Lincoln's land. 

Eighty-and-eight years ago his birthday. Long ere 
this, even with no foreclosure, he would have died. How 
swift are the years ! Thirty-six backward and last night, 
the fair skies weeping, he was saying his good-by to 
Springfleld neighbors. Thirty-six years tomorrow, and 
in the House of Representatives, while hate howled its 
impotence, the electoral vote was officially declared. Let 
not that time of astonishment and trembling be named 
without recalling how Dix and Holt and Stanton stood 
fast, while Floyd and Thompson and the rest were rot- 
ting like maggots from a torch ! And with all the true 
in deathless fame, name that last of the better Whigs — 
that rugged Virginian — Winfield Scott, (do not forget 
that also Thomas and Farragut were of the ' Old Domin- 
ion' !) whose loyalty in those first frightening days alone 



THE LIKENESSES 17 

safeguarded the all-important seat of government, and 
who, when Wigfall asked whether "If for an overt act he 
would dare arrest a Senator of the United States," re- 
plied: "No; I would blow him to Hell!" Such deter- 
mination sent the familiar spirits of secession to their 
own place. There was "a dread Scott" decision worth 
having. 

Far more, gentlemen, than we are wont to realize, does 
the dissemination of their whole biographies spread the 
influence and perpetuate the motives of our lamented 
and departed leaders. Thro all the first half of this cen- 
tury the popular knowledge of Washington thus diffused 
was an incalculable, however unrecognized, force in edu- 
cating that loyal sentiment lying back of the tremen- 
dous resolution which the Sixties registered and fulfilled. 
Speaking of the hold had upon him by the story of the 
Jersey campaign, Lincoln himself said; "I remember 
thinking that these men must have been encouraged by 
something uncommon to suffer so willingly." 

The lately issued volume, by Ida Tarbell, that has 
gathered so much that is new and nearly all that can be 
authentic concerning Lincoln's early life merits our full- 
est attention. With each item and shred of such a story 
every American heart should be familiar. But to my 
thinking the numerous and various portraitures, many 
of them not before printed, are of pre-eminent impor- 
tance. These, even alone, in a sequence which clearly 
exhibits the development of his character, contain the 
supreme biography. The last seven years of his life are 
in those likenesses. There is the story of the great war. 
His brow changes from 1861 to 1864 as if under the 
pressure of thrice as many years. And under the shadow 
and palimpsest of strife is — peace! His representative 
responsibility for a people's trial and doubt and victory 
is told there, and 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

" There was a manhood in his look 
That murder could not kill." 

What a personality, and what a story ! How acutely, 
how exhaustlessly fascinating is its pathos ! My poor 
sickle can only glean. At first, as we think of his heredity 
and environment, we wonder how such a man could have 
issued from such circumstances: but reflecting, we dis- 
cern that those antecedents were not accidental, but 
providential, and that the God who intended the result 
furnished the disciplines. 

Sprung from the loins of the people to be their leader 
and commander, he was one by whom it shall always 
mean more to be an American and a man ! God was the 
tutor of this great commoner, and, as he so often said, 
'' God knows what is best." One of that God's surprises 
— his career — is a standing rebuke of all dilettante idle- 
ness and freezes the sneer upon the thin lips of caste. He 
inherited his father's frame and his mother's heart as 
his sole fortune. They were enough. They gave him, as 
his pre-eminent traits, that courage and that sympathy 
which were the outfit of a peerless manhood. 

Humanly speaking, he was never brought up — he 
came up, by hardest struggle, thro dismal lack and 
stark necessity. But up he came and up he stands for- 
ever, distinctly the typical American nobleman. Let 
those who would hold the stirrup of alien underlings and 
play the flunkey to titular rank, however rank its 
ignobility, summon their scant brains to consider this 
indigenous soul and to learn that no cradle of Plantag- 
enet or Hanover, of Bourbon, Hapsburg or Branden- 
burg, ever rocked so much of immortal renown. 

Opportunity for the lowliest to become the loftiest, — 
this is the lesson of that frontier hovel. Spite of all con- 
trary opinion, true beauty and integrity of manhood is 
not incompatible either with harsh beginnings or with 



HIS MATERIAL 19 

the strenuous exactions of affairs. His education, as 
Lincoln said, was '^picked up under the pressure of neces- 
sity." Of school attendance one year was all he had. 
But always a learner, he came at last in practical wis- 
dom to be a scholar and to the last day of his life he 
grew in mental and moral stature. How must that 
example of painful struggle toward self-improvement 
shame the most of us ! For who of us has made his best 
of those advantages for which this backwoodsman pined 
in vain ? 

His books were chiefly these: — Burns, ''The Pilgrim's 
Progress," Shakespeare, Weem's ''Life of Washington,'* 
the English Bible. But these he knew. Of the Bible he 
memorized much. Its style and actual phrase were at 
his large command, and its supreme ideas, as well as its 
elastic idiom, gave power to many of his most critical 
utterances. This apparatus of education, gentlemen, if 
small, was not meagre — allegory, humor, moral imagin- 
ation, dramatic feeling, patriotic history, folk-lore, devo- 
tion, — these were in those few but potent books. He 
mastered his material and one language sufiiced him. 
No one can ponder the substance, the solidity, the tact, 
the appeal of that majestic second inaugural and not 
feel that here was a master of arpeggios. Who, to take 
an earlier instance, can consider the acumen and precis- 
ion of his emendation of Seward's State despatch over 
the matter of the Trent affair and not confess Lincoln as 
'^cunning with the pen" a&he was astute in diplomacy? 

Carlyle wrote, "All time greatness is melancholy." 
There ran thro this introspective soul a deep vein of sen- 
timent. The sad-faced child became a brooding and 
silently yearning man. He saw visions and dreamed 
dreams. His adroit humor is pathetic as we think how 
truly he could have said, after Desdemona, 
" I am not merry ; but I do beguile 
The thing I am by seeming otherwise." 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

There was a minor note which gave the people's heart 
a near access to him which few had as individuals ; for 
most reverently we can say that he, too, was "a, man of 
sorrows and acquainted wdth grief." Much misery had 
taught him mercy, and there is a most plaintive longing 
in that admonition to his little Tad, — " My boy, I would 
have the whole human race your friends and mine." Lin- 
coln's love of that poem, ''Oh, Why Should the Spirit of 
Mortal Be Proud?" has re-written it, and not for "Tril- 
by," but for his sake, who loved it dearly, will we still 
sing "Ben Bolt." For he, too, had his "sweet Alice" — 
long dead. 

Farmhand, flatboatman, store-clerk, land surveyor 
(as was Washington), militiaman, county lawyer, then 
all at once the heart and the will of a mighty party — 
nay, of a people ; then the object lesson of the world ; 
then the lament of a generation ; then — immortal! The 
path fitted the goal. For his sake, if for no other, the 
Potomac and the Ohio and the Sangamon are the "three 
principal rivers " of America. What a time was that for 
which he came to his more than kingdom ! Curtis said : 
"The world sneered as it listened, and laughed at a Re- 
public founded upon liberty and afraid to speak the 
word at home. Our feet had slipped to the very brink 
of the pit and were scorched with fire." The Missouri 
Compromise had been repealed. The "Dred Scott" 
decision had seemed to make the Ship of State a slave- 
ship ! The President's place, as one has sternly said, was 
vacant, while James Buchanan drew the salary ! 

The Chicago Convention of 1860 did not realize all it 
had done in placing its banner in Lincoln's hand : but 
which one of all his apparent peers could so have borne 
it ? Neither he nor the wisest could then have compre- 
hended his mission or its grandeur. But he went on his 
way "with firmness to do the right as God gave him to 



THE RESPONSE 21 

see the right,"' and the common people, who once had 
flocked to listen to his court pleas, still flocked and still 
listened to their leader. 

With what broad sagacity he composed the first Cabi- 
net and with what surprise they discovered the calm 
self-reliance and determination of their master! From 
the outset his remarkable estimating of men, his keen 
perception of aptitude, his dignified independence, his 
finality of cautious decision, stood revealed. No 'boss' 
whispered behind that chair which some before him had 
occupied, but which Lincoln abundantly filled. He re- 
deemed the Chief Magistracy from those associations of 
mediocrity which a Tyler, a Polk, a Pierce had imposed 
upon it. Such as this unshorn Nazarite be all our Presi- 
dents to come ! Seward had imagined that for himself 
to be Secretary of State was to be first in the Cabinet 
group, but he learned that even he was as a boy driving 
with a father's hands over his upon the reins ! He recog- 
nized the situation, as later Stanton also did, — Stanton, 
so magnanimously appointed and whose affection was 
at once his own rarest honor and to his chief the most 
masculine tribute. Would that Chase had been as 
great ! 

Then came the solemn "So help me God!" of that 
fourth of March, and when, after the long suspense dur- 
ing the first part of that deliverance, the shout of the 
concourse broke out in floods, rebuking the faces of dis- 
loyal hate that glowered about, this Union knew that it 
had found not only an official, but a man! As over 
Israel's first King, "Certain sons of Belial said, 'How 
shall this man save us?' : but he held his peace." Fast 
went the strange, foreboding days until there came the 
hour of that other Kentuckian — Robert Anderson! 
Then rang out the awful trumpet, and every good hand 
was at the halliards. Up went the flag to the watchword 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of John A. Dix. This city was scarlet with it as never 
since— save once. The Sixth Massachusetts marched 
out of your Astor House to the tune of '< Yankee 
Doodle!" After her swept your own true Seventh to 
the Capital. Stephen A. Douglass (and for that we for- 
get all else) declared: ''When hostile armies are march- 
ing under new and odious banners against our common 
country, the shortest road to peace lies in the most 
unanimous and stupendous preparation forwar ! " There 
leaped the live thunder and every rattling crag of Lib- 
erty answered it ! 

Sounded out mightily the first of those proclamations 
demanding the great price of freedom ! Then from the 
lumber camps of the Androscoggin and the Escanaba ; 
from the quarries of Vermont and New Hampshire ; from 
the fishing-smacks of Massachusetts and the spindles of 
Rhode Island ; from the colleges of Connecticut and New 
York and Ohio; from the mines of Pennsylvania and 
Michigan ; from the counting-rooms of the cities of Sam 
Adams and Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin, and 
cities a hundred more; from the Adirondacks and the 
Alleghanies and the far Sierras ; from village and prairie 
and lakeside and highway, there rose the answer of the 
free — "All up ! " The old Liberty Bell that so long had 
slumbered found its voice again. The giant was awake ! 

Froude, of whom Birrel writes that his ''antipathies 
seemed stronger than his sympathies,'' declared in Feb- 
ruary, 1864, '' Washington might well have hesitated to 
draw the sword against England could he have seen the 
countr^^ which he made as we see it now." The trouble 
with some Britons, gentlemen, (thank God not all !) has 
been that they spelled the word prophets with an "f" 
and an "i." There was another England — the England 
of the Prince Consort and of John Bright. But desper- 
ate indeed were those ransoming years. In 1860 we only 



THE TENSION 23 

hoped that we had a country. In 1865 we knew that it 
was more than we had asked or thought. 

While the plough rusted and the anvil was dumb, one 
high soul never doubted nor hesitated. Leading always, 
even when he seemed only to follow, he was the piston 
behind which the pulse of the people pushed irresistibly. 
Firm, conservative, moderate, sure, this great emanci- 
pator understood that there is a time to wait and a 
time to strike. Too swift for some, too slow for others, 
his vast common-sense, his judgment, that became an 
intuition, perceived both the right word and the right 
moment. Wendell Phillips, whose electricity was so much 
of it generated by the reaction between metal and vit- 
riol, called Lincoln a "tortoise"; but Lowell said "he 
knew to bide his time." 

At a New Orleans slave auction in the forties he had 
said of that devilish system : "If I ever get a chance to 
hit it, I will hit it hard." W^hen the hour struck he 
crushed it forever and now there is none so low but does 
him reverence. Can you not see him (when at last the 
dream of Sophism was broken to awake and find itself 
empty) pressing the streets of fallen Richmond, and can 
you not hear that aged negro: "May the good Lord 
bress you, Massa Linkum''! Silently the great man 
raises his hat, bows and passes by. There fell the bene- 
diction of a disenthralled race and there responded the 
salutation of a martyr — the true moriturus saluto of a 
gladiator in the arena of Time and from under the shad- 
ows of Death. 

What words, what elemental words, he spake — this 
unconditional man! What a repertoire are his untar- 
nished phrases of patriotism and high devotion! His 
proclamations were battles, conclusions, anthems. Apt 
in adage and apothegm, his illustrated speech, so homel^^ 
yet so constructive, was like that of J^sop and his plain 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

wisdom was most of all like that of Socrates. '^I have 
talked with great men," said Lincoln, ''and I do not see 
how they differ from others." No, not in talk, in mean- 
ing, nor in mt, so much as in the will to use these wisely. 
Lincoln had that true oratory which in Webster's words 
"does not consist in speech, but exists in the man, in the 
occasion and in the subject." Candor, conviction, clear- 
ness — these were his ; and of him David Davis said : "All 
facts and principles had to run thro the crucible of an 
inflexible judgment." 

This homely oracle, tho never clouded by abstrac- 
tions, was withal a supreme idealist. He saw above the 
storm the white-winged Angel of Peace, and therefore 
with all his heart and soul he urged forward the neces- 
sary war. 

Having handled every rung of the ladder, Lincoln was 
in all things practical. He would jettison any theory to 
save the fact. Intense, yet tranquil ; temperate, yet un- 
austere ; bold, but never rash ; informal, but self-respect- 
ing; as modest as resolute, — his were no footlight graces. 

He felt for others, and plain men trusted him by in- 
stinct. Himself walking upon hot ploughshares, he 
smiled and looked up ! He loved the whole nation and 
the whole nation now loves him. In him the South that 
was lost its ablest friend, and the South that is has 
come to know it. 

In the study of that lofty individuality I note first his 
courage. Of desponding temperament, he was the stub- 
born conqueror of his own fears. That critical utterance 
concerning "a house divided" recalls it. Manipulators 
shrank, time-servers winced, friends protested, but with 
all the fearlessness of Luther at Worms he said: "By 
this statement I will stand or fall." That declaration 
was at once a war and a peace — a peace with honor. 
There this Atlas bowed his back to lift a world ! Detrac- 



HIS CONFIDENCE 25 

tion and jeers but steadied him. His was that forbear- 
ance which in the words of Governor Black's late inaug- 
ural, " is the highest proof of courage." When the tumid 
press ranted, raved, caricatured, he told the story of the 
man who prayed in a frightful thunder-storm, "Oh, 
Lord, a little more light and a little less noise!" He 
replied to nervous advisers in 1863: "Grant tells me 
that by the Fourth of July he will take Vicksburg and I 
believe he will do it; and he shall have the chance." It 
was done. In April, 1864, he put his whole confidence in 
that same Grant, saying to him as he went down to that 
awful reaping, "With a brave army and a just cause, 
may God sustain you ! " When Early, in 1864, checked 
but not stopped by the tremendous resistance of Lew 
Wallace at Monocacy, thundered at the very gates of 
Washington, Lincoln never doubted, but waited for the 
Sixth Corps and deliverance. 

His courage was rooted in his sublime faith. It was 
exceptional, absolute, grand. It moved mountains. His 
central power was moral. Herndon said, "His con- 
science is his ruling attribute." Mr. L. E. Chittenden, in 
his invaluable "Reminiscences," has collected in a whole 
chapter Lincoln's own and many words as a devout be- 
liever in the power of the Highest. It should forever 
stop the mouths of gainsayers, whether infidel or theo- 
logical. "Whatsoever shall appear to be God's will I 
will do," was his constant attitude, and than that 
naught can deeper go. 

This is of record : Upon the third day after the "Peach 
Orchard" Lincoln called upon the wounded Sickles. I 
have had it also from Sickles' own lips. Talking of the 
great slaughter, with streaming eyes the President told 
of his own assurance of the result, of his praying in his 
own locked room as never before: "I told God that I 
had done all that I could, and that now the result was 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

in His hands ; that if the country was to be saved it was 
because He so willed it. The burden rolled off my shoul- 
ders, my intense anxiety was relieved, and in its place 
came a great trustfulness ; and that was why I did not 
doubt the result at Gettysburg." Others for themselves 
may say what they like of that ; I say that it is the de- 
monstration of one anointed — of the Nation's High Priest. 

Diplomat, strategist, master of speech, monarch of 
occasions, humane, believing, often did he weep; but 
never did he flinch or falter; and, when he was not, it 
was with ** abundant entrance" that he went to find his 
Anne Rutledge and his Lord! "Oh, piteous end!" 
"Fallen, cold and dead" the Captain lies. That face, 
with all its rugged honesty, its homely beauty, its lines 
of leadership in suffering, its august peace, is gone ! The 
long columns that tread Pennsylvania avenue, with the 
smoke of the great sacrifice behind them, will not salute 
the chief. 

But those other squadrons invisible that crowd the 
air — the loyal legions of those who have passed from the 
camp-fire to the Hosanna, from the blood-red bayonet 
to the wreath of amaranth, "the great cloud of wit- 
nesses" — there is he, passed over to the ranks of the im- 
mortal great. At its very meridian, snatched from our 
skies, that soul shines on and will shine "till the stars 
are cold." 

The completions of such a life are not withheld — they 
are transfused. We are today what Lincoln helped us to 
become. That God he so trusted and served grant that 
this may be the nation Lincoln strove and died to make 
it. His work is not yet done. That tale, fit for the 
foundation of a mighty drama, worthy of a deathless 
epic, will never be exhausted while the last American 
remains who is a man. The hills sink as we leave them, 
the mountains rise. 



THE LESSON 27 

Once more, if you are true Republicans, by this im- 
mutable renown are you bidden to that patriotism to 
which all narrower titles are but subordinate and instru- 
mental. This people's man certifies to us that the Re- 
public must voice the people, else it shall sink into 
autocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, anarchy. So God 
purge us of bad men and their bad ways. 

" Bring me men to match my mountains, 

Bring me men to match my plains ; 
Men witli empires in their purpose 

And new eras in their brains ; 
Pioneers to clear thought's marshlands 

And to cleanse old error's fen ; 
Bring me men to match my mountains — 

Bring me men! " 

We shall be just as good a party as we are determined 
to be. We shall have just as good leaders as we deserve 
— no better. We must summon to our ranks and be 
worthy to keep there all who love our Nation's truth, 
and who fear not to voice its conscience, at every haz- 
ard. We must be sworn anew not to surrender our inde- 
pendence to unauthorized proxies. We must hold to the 
most exact audit the men we select and trust — to watch, 
to cheer, to correct, to promote or to depose them. 

O Ship of State! 
^'In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! 

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all avith thee." 



Ill 



Hbrabam Xlncoln 

SAID AT CARLISLE, PA., 1900; AT SYRACUSE, N. Y., 
1903; AT NEW BRITAIN, CONN, 1903; AT YOUNGSTOWN, 
OHIO, 1904; AT PEORIA, ILL., 1908; AT GRAND RAPIDS, 
MICH., 1909; AT THE COOPER UNION, NEW YORK CITY, 
1910; AT INDIANAPOLIS, IND., 1911; AT UTICA, N. Y., 
1917; AND FOR SUBSTANCE FIVE TIMES ELSEWHERE. 




ISTORY is the stud^^ of personal deeds. 
Their dramatic example is the sum of all 
precept. The physical world is but the 
scenery of those events in which great 
leaders find their following. We speak to- 
night of "a life 
Given for the life of the whole live land." 
The story of Lincoln does not wear out. That sincere 
and intrepid personality lacks not one element of appeal 
to reverent gratitude, to affection, to imagination, to 
courage. It is the deepest and humanly most dear thing 
in the annals of America. We are hungry for every 
authentic item as to what he wrought and was. It is all 
so simple and attainable that it is not to be exploited, 
but only explained. Its mystical charm, its ripple of 
rare music, is no theme for mere rhapsody and boister- 
ous rhetoric, but for quiet reason, asking apostrophe 
as little as the polar star! Needing no superlatives, there 
he stands, — "one of Plutarch's men'' — serenely fair, a 
point for us steadfastly to steer by thro all the weathers 
of change. 

Introducing his 'Spirit of the Laws,' Montesquieu 
said — ''If this work meets success, I shall owe it to the 
grandeur and majesty of the subject." Let the sermon 
be hidden by its text. Let us recite fond names that 



32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ourselves may be surer of what is really potent and that 
our kindled emulations may effectually perpetuate the 
deeds of the just. "A people is but the attempt of the 
many to rise to the completer life of one." 

Let Abraham Lincoln rebuke those who shelter under 
the banyan-trees of genealogy, prizing themselves that 
they 'are not as other men are'; for not source and cir- 
cumstance, but the man, rules every epic. He fellowed 
his time and walking with the multitude he taught the 
multitude to march with him. ''Many kings have sat 
dow^n upon the ground and one that never was thought 
of hath worn the crown," 

Chronology is an excellent framework. About these 
clustering ten thousand events, one hundred major 
dates sketch the world. Fifty out-standing lives give us 
the bed-plates and rafters of our American house. 
Typical biographies reflect the eras their men created. 

This month of February is enriched for us by the anni- 
versaries of our two chief political ancestors — one, under 
God, Father of our Country, one its Preserver. Each of 
these thought continentally, served to the full, and lives 
immortal. We consider the issue of their lives that we 
may better imitate their faith. Copy them, repeat them, 
none can. There could be no ' understudv ' of Washino-- 
ton and to pose as a resemblance of Lincoln would be 
only ludicrous. Each was his own largest self. But these 
vital men if not our models are our mentors. They im- 
part their great motives, and by our estimate of them 
we are judged. "To turn events into ideas — (writes 
Santyana) — is the function of literature." But to turn 
ideas into events is the function of life ! Thus we recon- 
struct the story into new fact and in our turn dare live. 

Some persons are temperamentally incapable to under- 
stand Lincoln. Would we, who praise him dead, have 
appreciated him living ? It is an emaciated pedantry to 



THE ACTUAL MAN 33 

"garnish the sepulchres of the prophets" and then to 
refuse faithfully to meet the crises of our times ! If Lin- 
coln's spirit shall no more be our monitor, laud him as 
we may, we are no more his heirs ! To extol the departed, 
yet to abandon living moral leadership, is not even a 
good plagiarism. 

It cannot be mine to tell you any new thing of this 
prevailing man: but only to urge your more resolute 
honor of his name, thinking of him the while as a dear 
personal friend, — thanking God that thro Lincoln we 
did not break up housekeeping and that these war- 
welded states are a Nation at peace and not in pieces ! 

We must demand to know the actual Lincoln— the 
whole of him, without omission, glamour or apology, 
without artifice or myth,— a77 that he did and spake— 
his homemade fashion, his temperament, ambitions, 
means, obstacles, — his large laughter, his splendid wrath 
— we will have him. just as he was! 

Every reflection of him therefore — Hapgood, Hay, 
Herndon, Stoddard, Carpenter, Chittenden, and the rest ; 
the early details of Ida Tarbell's book, but especially 
those likenesses, showing the imprint of that last decade 
of swift, solemn years — the pain, the patience, the pur- 
pose; — we want all of it, undecorated and undissembled. 

We want everything he said or wrote; the Douglas 
debate, his proclamations, his letters (and this was one 
he took time to pen) : " I have been shown in the files of 
the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-Gen- 
eral of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five 
sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I 
feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine 
which would attempt to beguile 3^ou from the grief of a 
loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tender- 
ing to you the consolation that may be found in the 
thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your 
bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory 
of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be 
yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of 
freedom." (Nov. 21, 1864.) What four sentences are 
these! 

Yes, and his blunt personalities ; his jokes ; his caustic 
logic; the law-brief memorandum — "Skin defendant"; 
those syllables at Gettysburg, showing how straight and 
far one thinks who thinks with his heart ; and that tre- 
mendous "lost speech," at whose close the audience 
heaved toward him with one terrible roar of resolve, 
while out of the clouds of passion blazed the angry light- 
nings of war! His words are his open and electrical 
secret. They were deeds, campaigns. We want to know 
what others said to him and of him and what the world 
says of him now — this huge wonder! 

We would see his great ears; his shambling, bony 
length ; that big determined nose ; those honest, twink- 
ling, tender, far away, eyes; his strange, mobile and 
capable mouth ; his strong, affectionate chin ; his tousled 
hair ! We would consider the mold of that experienced 
band— 

"The hand of Anak, sinewed strong, 

The fingers that on greatness clutch ; 
Yet lo ! the marks their lines along 
Of one who strove and suffered much. 

Lo, as 1 gaze, the statu red man, 
Built up from yon large hand, appears, 

A type that Nature wills to plan 
But once in all a people's years ! 

All is indispensable. All belongs to us. Lincoln is ours! 

In his concentrated person was the unrecognised spirit 

of his time and into that he led even those who could 

not or would not understand him. How far he was un- 



THE BLIND CRITICS 35 

comprehended let the scurrile, but well-repented, jests of 
Punch, not only, but of Harper's testify;— the biting 
assaults of the Tribune and the gibes of editors a hun- 
dred more. And yet Horace Greeley lived to write, "Lin- 
coln was the foremost convincer of his time." 

It is well to recall that popular impatience of him and 
his words that answered it: ''We accepted this war for 
an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when 
that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will 
end until that time." 

To collate the spleen vomited upon him in the elec- 
toral campaign of 18G4 would show the endurance to 
which he was called. Alas, they knew not what they 
did ! But hear — 

"The election of Lincoln means anarchv." (Indianap. Sen. 
Sept. 18.) 

"If Lincoln is re-elected the liberties of the people are gone 
forever." (NilesRep.) 

"Ought he not to receive the eternal maledictions of the white 
race?" (Cin. Enq. Sept. 24.) 

But why quote more of a malignity and raving rivalled 
only by the villification once poured upon Washington! 
Verily, these purblind fools have also their award from 
history ! 

Before pencil of caricature and pen of travesty ; before 
these who scolded, snubbed, patronized, lampooned, 
him ; who deemed character by clothes and courage by 
declamation, his sorrowful and stately spirit stood as 
some tall tower stands to the wind and rain. He ex- 
pected men to desert him : but, artist that he was in 
humility and in patience, he bore and waited. With his 
vast resolution and audacious tenacity there went also 
a beautiful forbearance and a sublime magnanimity, 
and in these he rose a royal head above his rash and 
vociferating censors. Judge Davis bore witness— "I 



36 ABEAHAM LINCOLN 

never heard Lincoln complain of anything." But that 
he felt it all is told in his pathetic avowal — "I have en- 
dured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and 
have received a great deal of kindness not quite free 
from ridicule. I am used to it." 

Where did he come from, — this big being, ''striding 
out of the woods of the west"? He was no angel, he 
walked the ground. Born into the rough cradle of the 
pioneer, all about those earliest days was squalid and 
raw. He knew the earth and the axe. Daily bread was 
a problem in that dismal frontier cabin, with its door of 
slabs and no windows. A little lad he climbed to his bed 
of leaves in the loft by a row of pegs driven into the log 
walls. (Always he was climbing, a peg at a time !) But 
we need not linger at that hovel ; both because it is all 
painfully familiar, and because every exceptionally orig- 
inal man is unprecedented and not explicable by environ- 
ment. We only know that so it was, and that 

" As the Sun breaks thro the darkest clouds 
So honor peereth in the meanest habit." 

Thank God for that blessed stepmother— Sarah Bush 
Lincoln, whose kind heart first wakened and warmed the 
yearning soul of the solitary boy! She began him. 

This reassuring and necessary man comforts us that 
in the loins of Democracy are those who shall arise to 
vindicate man-right, and to refute the Brahmin. Time's 
surprises have always been ' laid in a manger ' and come 
out of some Nazareth. In the crucible of penury and 
privation Lincoln became in the noblest sense a Stoic 
and a Spartan. He was indigenous to plain men— the 
great average of the world— and knowing them he was 
always toward them. "So long (said he) as I have the 
memory of my hard-working, hard-fisted father, the 
people will have my heart." Thus he stood against 



HIS MENTAL MUSCLE 37 

oligarchy and eYerj-arcby that oppresses manhood, in 
a day when the RepubUcans were the true democrats. 

Grounded by emergency and drilled by fact he was 
ever stripping away the merely incidental and striving 
to manage the essential idea, studying reality, holding 
each expediency as a step to the end. With none of the 
advantages, nor the disadvantages, of possession, he had 
self-possession and split his way along. He drove each 
runo- he climbed bv. He built his own stairs. "Never 
schooled and yet learned" he entered life heavily con- 
ditioned and sat upon the lowest bench in the plain pri- 
mary of hardship. Like Moses he was forty years in get- 
ting his education there : but he graduated with honor 
from the great university of America, in the class of 
1865 ! and into a fame which himself made and none can 
mar. For ease and power are of inverse ratio. It is 
strain that knits men. He who quarrels with the ordi- 
nary as insipid or trivial will not recognize the great 
occasion when it comes. Limitations, which for a weaker 
spirit smother aspiration, often reveal fitness to survive. 
Where the radish strikes the stone and is stunted, the 
oak grapples it, surrounds it, builds it into its own foun- 
dation and anchors into a second century ! 

Abraham Lincoln is the standing rebuke of caste, and 
of the whole hyper-valuation of apparatus. Few are 
willing to master the tonic lessons of adversity, tho the 
tuition is free : but this stubborn soul endured hardness 
all the way. What he was he had and little else, and he 
is a sa\ing offset for the emetic trifler and the litter of 
snobs, who care more for "Who's Who?" than for 
whafs what! His grace was fairness, his dignity hon- 
esty, his etiquette no Delsartian affectation, but the 
good manners of the heart. Imagination, invention, 
initiative, were bred of his sinewy experience. 



38 ABBAHAM LINCOLN 

When a country store-clerk he bought o! a passing 
emigrant an old barrel and found in it a tattered copy 
of Blackstone. That settled it. Now he knew what he 
wanted and the choice was made which bore upon the 
resultant man. At every date making the most of what 
he had, he was always becoming more and learning 
that ingenuity and ingenuousness which were to stand 
him in well at last. For the bulk and heft of education 
is moral. Application is more than appliances. We do 
not judge a workman by the novelty of his tools. A 
small school may issue large scholars. His fibrous, 
wiry and limber mind held like a vise all it gained. It 
was screwed in. The old spelling-school, the flat-boat, the 
village wrestling-match, the primitive circuit-riding, — 
these, and then — Lincoln! He felt for the hinges and 
handles of things, and tempered his plain tools to the 
hardest point. To know just what "demonstrate" 
meant, he resolutely mastered the six books of Euclid. 
Thus he taught himself to avoid the irrelevant, to get 
the gist and core, to find order and clarity — to become 
the keenest cross-examiner and best all-around jury- 
lawyer in Illinois. "I was afraid some of them might 
not know him" ! — "If Douglas answers my question, it 
may cost me the Senatorship but it will cost him the 
Presidency." — His summary of the noisy doctrine of 
alleged ' Popular Sovereignty ' — "If any man choose to 
enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to 
object." So elemental was he ! His mental independence 
did not count precedents, but weighed them. Candid 
and open, he was in every circle the interesting and out- 
standing man. At first appearance he was to many 
weird and disappointing: but he grew commanding as 
he spoke on and with every lifting sentence the souls of 
those who listened came toward him ! His quaint and 
unstarched parables were never for mere mirth, but for 



HIS HUMAN FEELING 39 

the end's sake, and, laying the rock of his argument with 
the mortar of his humor, his wit sparkled in his logic 
like the mica in granite! He mimicked the wrong — 
never the true, nor busied himself to invent random 
epithets ! 

Note, first of all, Lincoln's sympathy. The valves 
of his heart were wide. The imagination of love aligned 
him with the central mass of men. The noblest enthus- 
iasm is tender toward others, and his conviction, always 
'touched mth emotion', gave an uplift to human 
nature. One who is all will can do many things that 
catholic feeling cannot do, also he can fail of the final 
appeal to palpitating life. That searching minor voice 
had never forgotten his Ann Rutl edge ! Far from "the 
shout of the crowd," a mysterious melancholy enfolded 
him. Pining for 'company in this busy wilderness', his 
inmost life was a solitude. Miscellaneous popularity 
was never his and even upon his few intimates in his 
sombre moods he shut the door. Always there was a 
thorn — "a minister of Satan to buffet him." It was as 
if an impending eclipse held him in its advancing 
shadow : but that cold craft which climbs by its friends 
and then spurns them he did not know. He had no 
schoolmasterly airs nor self-exploitations. 

The plaintive rhythm and elegiac note in song were 
dear to him. These lines, his own, show that his world 
was a sad one ; — 

" The friends I left, that parting day, 

How changed as Time has sped ; 
Young childhood grown, strong manhood grey, 

And half of all are dead." 

Thus he was the vicar of the longing and the lonely. He 
held in his soul the woes of Fredericksburg and Chan- 
cellorsville and the terrific anxiety of July 1863. It was 
a priesthood of pain. 



40 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

He delighted to pardon. A mother coming forth, with 
her son's Hfe granted, cried, with streaming face — 
"Homely! It's a copperhead lie. He's the handsomest 
man I ever saw! " But for two things his mind would 
have buckled under the strain, — his humor and his chas- 
tised and ever-enlarging faith. Courage, of a surface 
sort, is easy to the sanguine, but to a temperament like 
his only ' the fellowship of suffering ' can teach it. It was 
in this patience of hope that he uttered at Gettysburg 
the greatest poem ever said in America, — the immortal 
paean of democracy ! 

Remember next, his intuitive .judgment, — dispassion- 
ate, decisive, so sane and alert it was. A politician, in 
the astute but not the shifty sense, his tact read the 
times like a raised alphabet. His prescience was moral. 
He trusted the rigors of eternal right and so ' endured 
as seeing the invisible'. He had ethical perspective. His 
adroitness lay in striding past all irrelevant trifles and 
his timeliness in listening toward every point until his 
hour was ready. He bent himself to advance the fron- 
tiers of justice. All equity was dear to him and he 
" opened his mouth for the dumb." By shrewd instinct 
he dwelt upon the greater problems, common to all men, 
and appealed to the ordinary mind with extraordinary 
sagacit^^ Tennyson wrote of Wellington ; — 

"Rich in saving common sense. 
And, as the greatest only are, 
hi his simplicity sublime": — 

but greater than he who held the pinnacle of the world 
at Waterloo, was /26?re,— filled with that salt of wisdom 
which Coleridge said is "common sense in an uncommon 
degree." The pilot house was dark, but a big-boned 
hand was on the wheel, and, thro the wrack, a vigilant 
eye, a gaunt prophetic will, and a humble, praying 



HIS FARSIGHT 41 

heart was steering the great ship into the channels of 
righteousness ! 

For he was a prophet, — a dreamer, but not a vision- 
ary. May, 1856, at Bloomington, sounding such dia- 
pasons that the throng trembled and rocked before him 
like a stormy sea and that the very reporters forgot to 
make their notes, he thundered "Those who deny free- 
dom TO OTHERS deserve IT NOT FOR THEMSELVES, AND 

under the rule of a just god cannot long retain it. 
* * * Forbearance will stand us in good stead when 
IF ever we must make an appeal to battle and to 
THE God of Hosts. * * * We will say to the South- 
ern DISUNIONISTS, — WE WONT GO OUT OF THIS UnION AND 

YOU sha'n't!" In April, '64, he said — ''At the end of 
these three years of struggle the Nation's condition is 
not what either party or any man desired or expected. 
God alone can claim it. If God now wills the removal of 
a great wrong and that we of the North, as well as you 
of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that 
wrong, impartial history wall find new cause to attest 
the justice and goodness of God." 

The Divine dramatist was indeed standing within the 
shadows and thus did Lincoln "seethe curtain tremble 
with the breath of Him that was behind it." 

All these traits combined and culminated in his inde- 
pendence OF character, 

" Pouring his splendid strength thro every blow, 
The conscience of him testing every stroke." 

He could distinguish good advice from bad. He hated 
chicanery. Others might falter and palter, but he stood 
like a rock, holding fast to what he was sure of and liv- 
ing one day at a time. With everyone his critic he abode 
the event and did what he could with wliat was fur- 
nished. He had no local partialities. He trusted Sew- 



42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ard and Stanton, he forgave Chase, he believed in Grant, 
and he endured Cameron ! 

Sure that the Constitution was a modus vivendi, not a 
rigor mortis, that the Nation was paramount, he saved 
both and with his blood cemented this "indissoluble 
Union of indestructible States." Bending to no calumny, 
be sure he would stand now for all he stood for then. 

The first time he was nominated as an availability, to 
become the second time an indispensability. Then Sum- 
ter and Baltimore and the North leaping to the ranks, 
the direful, exasperating, days of -Gl-'GS, while we were 
getting ready, every north- and west-going train bear- 
ing coffins, a generation turning prematurely grey and 
the Nation — "plunged in heats of burning fears," 
shrinking appalled while God taught us integrity by the 
swingle of war. 

With straining back and bloody sweat Lincoln 
brought the capstone of that Nationality which Hamil- 
ton had grounded, Marshall defended, Webster exalted. 
With deeper pangs he set it fast, and then, the work of 
the Federalists completed, this enduring and accom- 
plished man gave up the ghost ! That last day, amid 
his family, Lincoln had said — "For the first time I feel 
the load lightened a little." The minor symphony was 
moving to its cadence ! The harsh harness was unfast- 
ening ! The last that passed those troubled lips was to 
his wife. He was saying what he would wish to do when 
free to rest — "There is no city I desire to see so much as 
Jerusalem.^' That word yet upon the air, the bullet 
came ! So fell life's curtain ;— nay, rose! The blow that 
tore away that sensitive soul, smote millions of hearts: 
but to him it was themccolade of God ! 

Then the people he had wrought for knew him at last. 
His story is theirs. They never will forget. The plain 
folk of all the world know him and they challenge Amer- 



THE CADENCE 43 

ica to be ''dedicated to that cause which he so nobly 
advanced." His great democratic cause cannot be a lost 
cause. The soil that bore such a son cannot become 
sterile. The bronze of that blessed and blessing memory 
can never tarnish, nor that granite equity fall. 

"So, (wrote Curtis, in 1865) came the May, ^oitXj 
gliding over grieving hearts and with her royal touch 
healing all our varied sorrows, — came the Queen for 
whom the people sighed and the land yearned,— came 
the well-beloved, the long-desired, palms in her hands 
and doves flying before her, and the name of that May- 
day Queen was Peace ! " But upon him, whose dauntless 
conviction had untangled the skein, who under God had 
pacified the land, a heavenlier light had broken ! 

Inveterate man ! Great immortal ! Out of the dusty 
years, we too salute thee ! Not as at Bloomington, with 
that fearless challenge to the future ; not uttering those 
two sublime inaugurals; nor there, nor there: — but in 
that hospital, bending to hold the hand of that dying 
soldier, in a mother's place ! Oh, benign story ! Unre- 
proachful and unreproachable thy patience and thy fame! 

If ever, girt by alien foes or threatened by mad hands 
from within, this Nation, so highly dedicated, shall again 
have the endurance of its liberties tested ; if ever we are 
summoned to rally to the death about that constella- 
tion which Lincoln kept unshredded ; the old organ tone 
will swell once more into 'the full chords of devotion' 
and upon every wind will flow the deep bourdon of 
answer,— " We are coming. Father Abraham ! " 



THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED AT THE 
COURIER PRESS, CLINTON, NEW YORK, 
DURING JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, 1917, 
FROM TYPE AT ONCE DISTRIBUTED 
AND IT WAS ISSUED IN APRIL. 

THE EDITION WAS OF ONE HUNDRED 
AND FIFTY-FIVE COPIES, NUMBERED, 
ONE COPY UPON PARCHMENT AND THE 
REMAINING COPIES UPON TUSCANY 
HAND-MADE PAPER. L 

OF THESE THIS COPY IS NUMBER . • 























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